Is Our Group An Agent? Do We Want It To Be?

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 539-551
Author(s):  
Mark N. Jensen
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Real World ◽  
Civil Society Organizations ◽  
Group Agency ◽  
Excellent Starting Point ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Legal Nature ◽  
Political Associations ◽  
Group Agents ◽  
Ideal Group

Christian List and Philip Pettit’s new book, Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents, is an interesting, timely, and extremely clever synthesis of the deliverances of their recent technical work on the philosophical, moral and legal nature of group agents. Their meticulously developed ideal group agent provides an excellent starting point for analytic reflection on group agency, identity, epistemology, and responsibility. Insofar as it is their intent for their account to have real world consequences, their model provides a template for political associations, businesses, and civil society organizations. This review essay explains List and Pettit’s model and then points out two unattractive features. First, a bird’s eye view of the conditions required to achieve ideal group agency reveals limitations that may make it impossible to realize. Second, some of these groups, especially businesses and civil society organizations, will find the model unattractive, limiting its real world applicability.

scholarly journals Revisiting the CompCars Dataset for Hierarchical Car Classification: New Annotations, Experiments, and Results

Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 596
Author(s):  
Marco Buzzelli ◽  
Luca Segantin
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
High Performance ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Levels Of Detail ◽  
Excellent Starting Point ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Hierarchical Nature ◽  
Multiple Levels ◽  
Entire Dataset

We address the task of classifying car images at multiple levels of detail, ranging from the top-level car type, down to the specific car make, model, and year. We analyze existing datasets for car classification, and identify the CompCars as an excellent starting point for our task. We show that convolutional neural networks achieve an accuracy above 90% on the finest-level classification task. This high performance, however, is scarcely representative of real-world situations, as it is evaluated on a biased training/test split. In this work, we revisit the CompCars dataset by first defining a new training/test split, which better represents real-world scenarios by setting a more realistic baseline at 61% accuracy on the new test set. We also propagate the existing (but limited) type-level annotation to the entire dataset, and we finally provide a car-tight bounding box for each image, automatically defined through an ad hoc car detector. To evaluate this revisited dataset, we design and implement three different approaches to car classification, two of which exploit the hierarchical nature of car annotations. Our experiments show that higher-level classification in terms of car type positively impacts classification at a finer grain, now reaching 70% accuracy. The achieved performance constitutes a baseline benchmark for future research, and our enriched set of annotations is made available for public download.

scholarly journals Reversing the Shrinking of Civic Spaces: Insights for Strategies to Expand and Strengthen Activism and Organizations in Mozambique

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 49-66
Author(s):  
Marcio Pessôa ◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
Contentious Politics ◽  
Civil Society Organizations ◽  
The Past ◽  
Civic Spaces ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
State And Market ◽  
Urban And Rural Areas

How can the shrinking of civic spaces be reversed? This article suggests an analytical approach to identify mechanisms that cause the shrinking of civic spaces in Mozambique, and presents a starting point for building strategies to react to this process. Based on interviews and participative observation in the field, it explores events and episodes where crucial issues or activists’ groupings were neutralised, and visits the theory of defiance in civil society, power and contentious politics to explain how the shrinking of civic spaces has been taking place in Mozambique in the past ten years. It is reasonable to state that activists need to cope with cultural and cognitive barriers in order to face the various expressions of state and market power in Mozambique. Civil society organizations need to work with their donors to create new forms of relationship together, where issues such as accountability, for example, do not put at risk civic spaces and projects that have made a positive difference to people’s lives. In addition, activists need to establish a joint lobbying focus for constructing a legal framework that facilitates the emergence of new civic spaces in urban and rural areas.

scholarly journals Transdisciplinary partnerships for sustainability: an evaluation guide

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan Plummer ◽  
Jessica Blythe ◽  
Georgina G. Gurney ◽  
Samantha Witkowski ◽  
Derek Armitage
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Continuous Improvement ◽  
Real World ◽  
Civil Society Organizations ◽  
Transdisciplinary Research ◽  
Important Approach ◽  
Development Agencies ◽  
Sustainability Challenges ◽  
Key Steps ◽  
Sustainable Futures

AbstractTransdisciplinary research, in which academics and actors from outside the academy co-produce knowledge, is an important approach to address urgent sustainability challenges. Indeed, to meet these real-world challenges, governments, universities, development agencies, and civil society organizations have made substantial investments in transdisciplinary partnerships. Yet to date, our understanding of the performance, as well as impacts, of these partnerships for sustainability is limited. Here, we provide a guide to assess the performance and impacts of transdisciplinary partnerships for sustainability. We offer key steps to navigate and examine the partnership process for continuous improvement, and to understand how transdisciplinary partnership is contributing to sustainable futures.

The elimination of violence and terrorism in Iraq strategy

2019 ◽  
pp. 375
Author(s):  
Mona Ali Duaij ◽  
Ahlam Ahmed Issa
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
The State ◽  
Civil Society Organizations ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
Terrorist Organization ◽  
The Media ◽  
Causes Of Crime ◽  
Religious Aspect

All the Iraqi state institutions and civil society organizations should develop a deliberate systematic policy to eliminate terrorism contracted with all parts of the economic, social, civil and political institutions and important question how to eliminate Daash to a terrorist organization hostile and if he country to eliminate the causes of crime and punish criminals and not to justify any type of crime of any kind, because if we stayed in the curriculum of justifying legitimate crime will deepen our continued terrorism, but give it legitimacy formula must also dry up the sources of terrorism media and private channels and newspapers that have abused the Holy Prophet Muhammad (p) and all kinds of any of their source (a sheei or a Sunni or Christians or Sabians) as well as from the religious aspect is not only the media but a meeting there must be cooperation of both parts of the state facilities and most importantly limiting arms possession only state you can not eliminate terrorism and violence, and we see people carrying arms without the name of the state and remains somewhat carefree is sincerity honesty and patriotism the most important motivation for the elimination of violence and terrorism and cooperation between parts of the Iraqi people and not be driven by a regional or global international schemes want to kill nations and kill our bodies of Sunnis, sheei , Christians, Sabean and Yazidi and others.

The Meritocratization of Civil Society

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Bovens ◽  
Anchrit Wille
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Third Sector ◽  
Political Influence ◽  
Public Affairs ◽  
Civil Society Organizations ◽  
Advocacy Groups ◽  
Interest Representation ◽  
The People ◽  
Professional Advocacy ◽  
Education Gap

Civil society organizations are, if not schools, at least pools of democracy. In the ‘third sector’, too, active engagement and participation ‘by the people’ have given way to meritocracy, or, in other words, to rule by the well-educated. Many popularly rooted mass organizations have witnessed a decline in membership and political influence. Their role as intermediary between politics and society has been taken over by professionally managed advocacy groups that operate with university educated public affairs consultants. First, the chapter describes the associational revolution, the enormous increase in the number of civil society organizations. Then it in analyses the education gap in membership and the shift from large membership organizations to lean professional advocacy groups, which has occurred over the past three decades. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the net effect of this meritocratization of civil society for political participation and interest representation.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Arneil
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Civil Society Organizations ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Rural Land ◽  
Internal Colonialism ◽  
Key Terms

Chapter 1 defines the volume’s key terms: domestic colonization as the process of segregating idle, irrational, and/or custom-bound groups of citizens by states and civil society organizations into strictly bounded parcels of ‘empty’ rural land within their own nation state in order to engage them in agrarian labour and ‘improve’ both the land and themselves and domestic colonialism as the ideology that justifies this process, based on its economic (offsets costs) and ethical (improves people) benefits. The author examines and differentiates her own research from previous literatures on ‘internal colonialism’ and argues that her analysis challenges postcolonial scholarship in four important ways: colonization needs to be understood as a domestic as well as foreign policy; people were colonized based on class, disability, and religious belief as well as race; domestic colonialism was defended by socialists and anarchists as well as liberal thinkers; and colonialism and imperialism were quite distinct ideologies historically even if they are often difficult to distinguish in contemporary postcolonial scholarship—put simply—the former was rooted in agrarian labour and the latter in domination. This chapter concludes with a summary of the remaining chapters.

Domestic Colonies

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Arneil
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Mentally Ill ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
The State ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Civil Society Organizations ◽  
Alexis De Tocqueville ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Peter Kropotkin

Colonization is generally defined as a process by which states settle and dominate foreign lands or peoples. Thus, modern colonies are assumed to be outside Europe and the colonized non-European. This volume contends such definitions of the colony, the colonized, and colonization need to be fundamentally rethought in light of hundreds of ‘domestic colonies’ proposed and/or created by governments and civil society organizations initially within Europe in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries and then beyond. The three categories of domestic colonies in this book are labour colonies for the idle poor, farm colonies for the mentally ill, and disabled and utopian colonies for racial, religious, and political minorities. All of these domestic colonies were justified by an ideology of domestic colonialism characterized by three principles: segregation, agrarian labour, improvement, through which, in the case of labour and farm colonies, the ‘idle’, ‘irrational’, and/or custom-bound would be transformed into ‘industrious and rational’ citizens while creating revenues for the state to maintain such populations. Utopian colonies needed segregation from society so their members could find freedom, work the land, and challenge the prevailing norms of the society around them. Defended by some of the leading progressive thinkers of the period, including Alexis de Tocqueville, Abraham Lincoln, Peter Kropotkin, Robert Owen, Tommy Douglas, and Booker T. Washington, the turn inward to colony not only provides a new lens with which to understand the scope of colonization and colonialism in modern history but a critically important way to distinguish ‘the colonial’ from ‘the imperial’ in Western political theory and practice.

Rights of the Child

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Asha Bajpai
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
International Law ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
Civil Society Organizations ◽  
Legal Definition ◽  
Rights Of The Child ◽  
The Government ◽  
Definition Of

The chapter commences with the change in the perspective and approach relating to children from welfare to rights approach. It then deals with the legal definition of child in India under various laws. It gives a brief overview of the present legal framework in India. It states briefly the various policies and plans, and programmes of the Government of India related to children. International law on the rights of the child is enumerated and a summary of the important judgments by Indian courts are also included. The chapter ends with pointing out the role of civil society organizations in dealing with the rights of the child and a mention of challenges ahead.

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